Imprivata and Courion - Best Deployment Scenario - Single Sign-On - Relieving Password and User Provisioning Woes

Challenges: As a cancer center with the third largest outpatient volume in the United States, Moffitt Cancer Center is a bustling institution with a national reputation for excellence in care and treatment. Moffitt operates 19 affiliate institutions, employs more than 2,600 people, supports in excess of 300 researchers and faculty from the University of South Florida, and handles over 232,060 outpatient visits per year.

Although security measures had been put in place to protect against unauthorized access of patient data, Moffitt’s IT officials saw two major challenges on the horizon that could hurt the Center’s mission: with several different applications to log in and out of, there was potential for password issues to eat up too much of the critical care staff’s valuable time; and, at the same time, Moffitt’s IT staff itself were facing back-end provisioning challenges, as adding and subtracting users became a manual nightmare. Any solution to the potential password problem needed to also closely tie into a solution for provisioning, otherwise new headaches could arise in managing staff access.

Moffitt had several concerns—what could they put in place that would increase the productivity of their workers and decrease help desk calls without hurting their overall security, which needed to remain at a high level? Was there a way to set it up so that each time a new user was entered in by HR, the system would automatically generate role-based credentials for that application and provision that user for the right application? How could they ensure that confidential patient information didn’t remain open on a computer—even if a staff member forgot to close it down when leaving a room or in a critical care situation? Could they fix these issues while at the same time continuing to provide an audit trail of access for regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)? With lives constantly at risk in the Cancer Center, Moffitt’s IT staff needed to address these challenges without disrupting patient care or forcing staff to change the way they work.

The burden was bound to become bigger, too. Moffitt has grown rapidly and in December of 2006 announced the formation of M2GEN, a joint venture with pharmaceutical giant Merck to develop individualized cancer treatments. M2GEN's facility will be built in the Tampa area and will add hundreds more users.

Moffitt’s IT team knew what they were looking for -- but it was a fairly tall order. They wanted to create an environment where users had the ability to launch their applications without having to remember 15 different passwords, which is a big, big problem for physicians. At the same time, they wanted to be able to streamline provisioning so that when a user is entered into the HR system, it automatically generates role-based credentials for that application, and provisions those users for the right application.